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25. EVERLASTING BIRTH PANGS

Late in spring, Steve and I were at Lowes buying veggies for the garden. He left me with a cart full of plants to go get something in the warehouse…a dangerous thing cause I LOVE flowers. Some dahlias called so I knelt to find the one that wanted to come home with me when I was approached by a tiny, slightly bent, very wrinkled, delightfully enthusiastic ancient Native American woman.

“Come, come. You must see these flowers.” She beckoned pushing a walker cart. I was enchanted by her energy and followed her. “These are the flowers for you.”

She showed me some bright yellow and pink annuals. “Touch them,” she insisted. The flowers were dry, perfectly preserved. I was amazed. “Strawflowers!” She exclaimed. “They’re for you.” I yearned to give her a big hug, but she was so tiny and fragile, I just caressed her shoulder as I thanked her. How could I not buy one?

So I planted a bright yellow strawflower in front and forgot about it…until last Memorial Day. I was on my way to finish my sculpture…and had an uneasy feeling all weekend. Driving over to Grandmother Kathy’s house filled with a familiar feeling of anticipation peppered by trepidation, I was transported back to 1984 driving to UCLA to pick up my first born from the NICU, excited but a little scared. My whole life would change when I brought him home. And now my life was changing again.

I cried the moment Kathy hugged me. “What’s wrong?” About to bring home another life changing creation, I knew that I would never be the same again.

My sculpture came out of the kiln relatively unscathed (a slight crack in the horse’s neck and her left knee…we all have birthmarks and scars, don’t we?) The retouch staining went well, but alas Kathy did not have the right glue to attach the crystal amethyst wings to the ceramic back of the woman so off we went to Lowes.

And Kathy led me right over to a lovely display of strawflowers. “Do you know what these are?” I nodded, as a matter of fact I did, and shared the story of the ancient flower woman with her. She was very excited and after getting the glue and another strawflower plant for each of us, we headed back to her house to attach the wings.

As we waited for the glue to dry, Kathy brought out an essential oil…Helichrysum…she said was from strawflower…yet I knew in holding the tiny vial…that wasn’t quite right…I envisioned a rougher plant… I was hesitant to smell it…She wondered why and I explained that certain odors are powerful memory inducers for me…finally I did…

…and I was in the tomb anointing Yeshua’s hands and feet. Then I went further back to just before the Seder…opening the alabaster jar, Judas reacted to the scent of the helichrysum…not the spikenard, frankincense or myrrh, but the helichrysum because…it was used to heal wounds, to revive…to resurrect…and now he had to do what was asked of him…he didn’t believe and the others, well, they didn’t know what was going on…Then I saw myself well before that last Passover collecting tiny dried yellow flowers from a rough lavender looking plant and simmering them in olive oil until the essence was extracted….Tears poured down my cheeks as I remembered…

Kathy was amazed…she called the essence “everlasting” Afterwards I looked it up online (I love my smart phone!) and found the plant from which the oil is derived….it looked like what I envisioned and the Latin name is “Immortelle”…

I found research on helichrysum for use in gingivitis. I decided to try it on my gums…Steve’s reaction to the smell was strong…he said it made him feel “very upset… please don’t use it again, please” My Mom found it healing, so much so just smelling it relieved a headache… Kathy had the same reaction as Mom…

Now once again I’m astride two worlds…as Jarys would say…the past and the present. Or if there is no time…I’m floating in my river of consciousness between the banks of what was and what will be.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

24. IN THE BATH

As I told my friend, I did not remember my childhood drama until after I gave birth to my first child. Jarys was born ten weeks premature, so we had to wait nearly six weeks before taking him home. Until then he stayed in the NICU at UCLA while Steve worked and I pumped. Day and night around the clock, I pumped my breasts to store the precious milk for our infant. It was all I could do. They wouldn’t let us hold him for very long so I spent more time bonding with my pump than my infant. But it was hardly a chore. In spite of the hand pump—I was never offered an electric model to bring home and my experience with the hospital pump was overwhelming—I got very good at using that odd plastic device.

Imagining his tiny face gazing up at me, the smell of the golden down of his head, the clasp of his fingers around my pinky and looking past the tubes riddling his miniscule frame and the antiseptic glow of the hospital, I would feel let down—that incredible fullness released in rhythm with a baby’s hunger. My breasts did not differentiate between infants. They let down at the cry of a hungry baby in church, at the grocery store, even on television. My milk seemed to flow for them all. As if through the flow I could somehow connect to my own baby so far away. The sensation of letdown would fill my heart. It’s the closest I would get to feeling love. Our bonding was broken by the traumatic delivery and long separation. Only through my imagination could I experience connection.

So every few hours, I pumped and feeling a great sense of accomplishment, I would pack up the frozen milk and drive the 90 miles from Goleta to Los Angeles. The nurses teased that I had enough to feed the entire NICU.

My mother lived closer to UCLA so often I would stay with her. Nana was still alive, although dying of metastatic lung cancer. And my youngest sister chose to live with Mom in the tiny condo rather than Dad in our big beautiful home. So it was crowded when I arrived each week after holding vigil besides Jarys’ incubator.

One night I awoke from a nightmare. I startled my Mom who was lying on the floor besides the couch. “What is it?” She asked, concerned. I described the dream in vivid detail…

I am four years old carrying the baby and herding the two-year-old twins into the bathroom. After setting the baby in the tub, I lock the door behind us, both doors, the one from the hall and the one leading to our parent’s room. Mommy is upset. Daddy is gone. He’s always gone. I sing to them and when the baby settles down and the twins begin to play, I call Nana. In my head, I call to her. And soon the phone rings and Mommy answers. It’s Nana…I wake up…

Mom confirmed that would happen often. She would be overwhelmed by the care of the four of us and worried about what Dad was doing. What he had been doing at the end of twenty-four-year marriage, not being faithful. They were in the process of getting a divorce when Jarys was born. They didn’t tell me right away waiting until I was far enough along in my pregnancy so that I wouldn’t miscarry due to the stress. But still it was stressful. We were less than a year married, both starting our careers, expecting a baby and trying to buy a home. Then Nana got sick and my parents announced their divorce, we take in my youngest sister for the summer, as the whole family whirls about in a tornado of change, and I go into labor prematurely. The stress won.

Remembering my past in its fullness not just the fairytale ideal that I had brought into my young adulthood changed me. I knew I didn’t want to be like my mother. She felt disempowered by her dependency on my father. I knew I didn’t want to be like my grandmother. She lived in a co-dependent relationship with my grandfather who was a recovered alcoholic. I had no other mother figures to model. I had to become a new kind of mom.

My parents’ divorce freed my mother. She began speaking her truth. Loudly in a very Italian way, but it was her truth as she knew it. One thing she taught me very early on was how to be in the moment. Jarys was about a year old, cruising around the furniture. I was behind him wiping up his handprints from the glass coffee table when my mother slapped my hand.

“Don’t be like me.” I looked up surprised. Like my grandmother, my mother was fanatical about cleanliness. I barely remember Nana without a rag in her hand wiping up something and Mom was just like her.

“He’ll only be little once. Enjoy it. The dirt doesn’t matter.” That was the first time I remember maternal advice coming from my mother. I took her words to heart. And I became a more relaxed, in the moment mom, trying not to worry about appearances like how clean my house was, and spent time with my precious child.

When Jarys was twelve I began a deeper level of soul work. I began to clear the dust from the inside of my light shade. I began to write poetry to help heal myself.

I called the collection: Dealing with Feelings through Verse. And through poetry I revisited the bath…

IN THE BATH

the baby is crying
the twins are spying
under the door of the bath
the water is running
she bravely is humming
to drown out her poor mother’s wrath

a mere child of four
walked in the bath door
dragging her siblings behind her
a woman emerged,
with so much to hide
childhood lost in a blur

three decades have passed
yet the pain ever lasts
will ever a child she be
or worse even yet
her own children bet
in her, her dear mother they see

she fights with the rage
turning now to the page
to pour out her heart’s pain and tears
first kissing her dear ones
then calling up dear mum
to find blessings over all these years

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

23. PRECIOUS

I’ve always felt precious. My mother called me her precious daughter until the day she died. My father treats me as if I am a precious gift. My grandparents beheld me with preciousness in their gaze. My aunt and uncle speak of their brief time with me as precious. And I have always felt life is precious. That my relationship with Steve is precious. That my children are precious gifts to me.

So how can preciousness and unworthiness live in one being? Because we live in a dualistic world. We are both self and other. We are both light and dark. We are both divine and human. We are in duality. In duality, we develop our sense of self, our egos. Our ego serves to differentiate us from others. Only when we drop the veil of ego can we be one with all that is. Yet being human, we need differentiation to appreciate connection.

My parents perceived my divine light. And I knew myself as precious until I developed my ego. Then under the veil of ego, I felt separation from all that is and began to feel unworthy. I could no longer perceive my own divine light.

While cleaning a stained-glass lamp, it came to me. The inner light was dull due to the dust of time. Yet polishing the outside of the glass did little to increase the brightness of the light. I had to polish the inside of the glass. Only then did the light shine with its true brilliance.

Same with us. We work so hard polishing our outer selves. Perfecting our appearances, our bodies, our faces, our clothes, the cars we drive, the houses we live in, the people we hang out with, the money in the bank, the roles we play…lots of time polishing our outsides… Never quite good enough always striving for more. Thinner, younger, prettier, stronger, richer, more successful.

Yet until we dive deep within to rediscover our preciousness do we spend time polishing our inner selves. Removing the dust accumulated over the years…the childhood traumas we reflexively relive, the generational thinking we carry as karmic imprints, the old paradigm beliefs we are afraid to give up…until we polish our inner selves does our divine light shine brightly enough for us to see it reflected in the world. In the faces of our family and friends, in our works, in our connection with the earth, in all of our lives.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

22. IN THE BEGINNING

So now that I’ve begun at the end, it’s time to go back to the beginning.

In the beginning, there was the One. It just was. No space, no time, no differentiation of any other. Then there was desire. Desire to know itself. Desire to know itself as more. Then there was the Word, the thought expressed. Creation became envisioned. First the One had to understand itself as a Self. The One as Self and then the realization that there are no others. So Self decided to define itself. The concept of space emerged as Self moved its consciousness to the boundaries of Self.

As Self noted that it knew more about its existence then it had in the beginning, time became relevant. Then the One created form. Form as a means to embody space and time. Then the One split into two. The One was like the light and the second aspect of itself was like the dark shadow of the light. Now the One had multiplied with clear differentiation between Itself and the Other. The Light One and the Dark One desired to know themselves as more and began to differentiate into many aspects of Self, each becoming more fragmented from the original One.

Oops…I went a little far back. In 2001, I had this vision, no more like a memory of being One. Like I could remember being part of The One. And then separate. My remembrance of Oneness, I felt whole, holy, complete and then…the separation and I felt less than, incomplete, yearning for more. And in that remembrance, I knew where my sense of unworthiness began. I came in with it and it’s been going on for a very long time.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

19. IS THE MUSIC STILL PLAYING?

My LoveDance® feels complete…but oh, not yet. It is time to go deeper…time to open the past. I must admit that when I did open my mother’s cedar chest, the ghosts of Deborah past knocked me back on my butt. My left sciatic ached for days…birthing pains…time to go back to the beginning. To face the old me. I do not like the way I wrote then…hiding my truth behind too many words…but I shall include some of it…just to see how far I’ve come on my journey.

20. HOT TUB ADVICE

I’m in the Jacuzzi with Steve enjoying our morning coffee. In the oak sprawled above us, squirrels chatter at crows taking refuge from a pair of bossy jays. This land of ours is teaming with life. Only an acre yet separated into garden rooms so that it feels like three. My mare watches us as the goat rubs against the new gate. The dog pokes his head over the edge of the tub. Steve gives him an affectionate pat. “You know you should start at the end.”

“What?” Overhead, a golden hawk cries—messenger of the divine. I listen closely to my beloved.

“Well, I like books that start at the end then go back to how they got there.”

“I think that’s what is being asked of me…how did I get here?”

He smiles, “I meant for LoveDance®.”

I give him a kiss, “Yes, but this is My LoveDance®.”

He sighs, “You’re going to tell it all, aren’t you?”

Yes. Yes I am.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

17. BLOSSOMING SPIRIT

Every year my women’s circle holds a retreat. In 2010, I felt this great need for freedom by the time we chose our theme. The group asked me to intuitively choose a card from the Triple Goddess Deck. I used another woman’s Kuan Yin necklace to act as a pendulum. The card chosen was Karmic Imprints and it was all about freedom—freedom from ancestral imprinting and your shadow. The work was deep and dark and powerful. What an amazing life changing retreat. That is where I finally let go of the last of my judgment. Finally let go of Bulimic Deb.

This year before we met for our first planning meeting, crow left me a feather…Bringer of the Triple Goddess Tarot Cards, I tied the triple goddess colors of white, red, and black around the crow feather and the eldest “crone” of our circle used the feather to divine the card. Blossoming Spirit was chosen—card number 5, the hierophant—with a strong rejuvenation theme. Just what I dreamt for our next retreat.

For three weeks, I asked crow for another feather having given up the beautiful one to the circle. And only after I abandoned the search to go on a carefree run with my dog Charlie did I find a black and white feather…balance…and then crow graced me with a pure black feather under the orange tree—where I pick sunshine to consume every morning before greeting my animals and old man crow!

Some of us felt that to truly birth ourselves anew as Blossoming Spirit, we must identify what is golden in the Divine Masculine. Yet most of the circle struggled with patriarchy. The emotional energy was so profound that I can remember to this day who was at the meeting, where they sat, what they wore, what they said. I watched as a few of the women took on the warrior energy while some just left their bodies. I was almost tempted to gather them into a protective circle of white light, when I felt guided to just observe.

After witnessing their reaction, I took my heavy heart to my beloved husband who shone some divine masculine light of wisdom upon me. Then I sat in counsel with my higher self, consulted with wise women and wondered when this Father Wound would be finally healed. For Blossoming Spirit to emerge at the fall equinox, balance must be reached.

It is time to heal the split with the Divine Masculine. I began this work exactly a year ago, composing and publishing two articles regarding the Divine Masculine before I was hit with Death…there my focus lie for months through the Karmic Imprint retreat and well after as I released all that no longer served my soul.

The summer before, I had an amazing dream that reminded me of an aspect of the Divine Masculine that has been forgotten…

I enter the Home Depot through the lumber department to get to the garden center. I’m going to buy jasmine. The center of the Home Depot is a raised platform and as I ascend the steps to the platform, a great Golden Bear comes through the door. It’s huge, larger than life, a golden orange color, translucent, brilliantly colored like a child’s crayon, surreal. I’m the only one to see it. It snuffles around the entry and I crouch down on the steps. It snuffles its way over to me. And snuffles my hair, my face, my neck. Then taps a great claw over my right eye, then over my third eye, again and again. Then it hunkers down over me like a mother bear over a cub. Yet I know this bear is male. I feel loved and protected like when Steve throws a leg over me, pulls me into his body—trapped by love. Trapped under the bear, I am secure, feeling the soft fur of its belly, the weight of its body, the warmth, the mass…protected in a golden cave of bear energy. Then the bear transforms into a…man. I can feel his naked body, the roughness of his hair, the shift in weight, mass, warmth from bear to man. We stand and face each other. I am WOMAN and He is MAN…all men, naked, dark skin and hair like a Mediterranean man. We take each other’s hands and then he disappears. A woman friend of mine says… “That is the forgotten aspect of the Divine Masculine.” And I wake up.

When I lie in Steve’s arms, his leg pressing over mine—the weight, heat and furriness comfortable, secure, I am very grateful to have found my home in his heart. I live with the Golden Bear energy of the Divine Masculine.

Although I have taken steps to heal my relationship with my own father and it’s going well, the Divine Masculine is up again…wanting to be healed in my soul, in the collective feminine, in the world…

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

15. DEATH AND THE WHITE LIGHT

Eddie. He came to me in the fall of 2002, diagnosed with lung cancer. His lawyer, a patient of mine, suggested he consult with me. I was the clinical endocrine advisor in a research project using natural progesterone to treat cancer at the Sansum Medical Clinic so she thought I could help him.

Cancer is not my specialty. I specialize in neuro-immune-endocrinology which I believe is at the core of most dis-ease. So I spent two hours going over his history, looking for signs of age-related decline that could be at the root of his illness, trying to understand why this brilliant man’s body was failing him at 52, and explaining the biochemistry of cancer as related to the complicated system of hormonal miscommunication with DNA.

Exuding enthusiasm, Eddie asked, “So you have something to balance my ligands?” He was brilliant, one of the only patients who understood the scientific lingo of my theories. He was even open to the psycho-spiritual roots of dis-ease, including the irony of being afflicted with cancer after inventing thermal implants to treat brain tumors.

In fact, I did have something—a formula to balance the hypothalamic orchestration of the neuro-immune-endocrine system—but, in theory only. After completing pilot studies the year before, my personal funds ran out and I struggled to find a manufacturer to mix even a small batch. Eddie took my hand and offered to help.

“No,” I protested, “you came here for me to help you.”

“Perhaps I came to help you. My cancer was a fortuitous portal for our meeting.”

Thus began our journey to manufacture my formula so he might partake of it. He truly believed he would be cured by my invention. In the meantime, I researched natural treatment regimens, since he was opposed to conventional therapies, and spent much time counseling him and sharing many spiritual portals. He treated me as a beloved daughter, introducing me to colleagues who would forge the path to the birth of my nutraceutical product. Becoming attached, I searched for cures for his cancer.

The day I brought the first bottle of Genesis Gold® to him, he smiled, beckoned me closer and whispered, “I knew you could do it.”

It was his last lucid moment. At the request of his family I had been coming to his lovely villa in the hills of Santa Barbara to help him die. As a nurse practitioner, I treated the walking well. Some patients had passed over the years, usually of old age, occasionally untimely, but not since being a neophyte nurse had I witnessed death.

After graduating nursing school in 1983, I worked on a surgical floor at UCLA Medical Center. We saw the sickest of patients—heart transplants, complete surgical resections of the bowels, lung resections. My first encounter with death was a young woman, my age, dying of pancreatic cancer. When I arrived on the night shift and saw her Do Not Resuscitate order, I knew her family and physicians had given up.
Not me! I was not going to let her drown in her own secretions and stayed by her bedside suctioning her tracheostomy. Her intern refused to give me a permanent suction order so that I would take care of my other three patients, so I handed him the suction catheter and called the chief resident. My colleagues were appalled. No one called the chief in the middle of the night, especially not a nurse.

Amazingly, he wasn’t upset, but asked if I saw the DNR order. “Doctor, I’m not resuscitating her. I just don’t want her to be alone. I…” Seeing the intern escape down the hall, I tried to hang up on the chief.

“Oh, no, you don’t. We’re going to discuss why you can’t let her die.” I resisted, but he kept me on the phone until it was too late.

The charge nurse helped me prepare the young woman’s body for the morgue. And with tears, I was forced to let my patient go.

Twenty years later, I was not so resistant. Eddie’s family left me alone with him. I sat at his bedside and meditated on how I could help him pass. I had already counseled with each of his family members. When I thought of his recalcitrant son who had finally agreed to see his father after our phone conversation that morning, I felt a wave of gratitude. And it wasn’t mine, it was from Eddie. I opened my eyes.

His diminished energy, faded to non-existent in his limbs, now concentrated in his heart chakra, shimmered, and I gasped to see a funnel of light connect to him. He appeared to lift from his form—pure white light not the fiery red of his life force—and enter the conical shaped energy. Other light forms greeted him, ancestors and guides, passing him along to the end. And at the infinite end of this brilliant white light was pure Love. He was enveloped, embraced like long lost lovers, the encounter so intimate; I was torn between turning away in deference to such a private moment and watching in awe.

Suddenly, Eddie’s essence turned away from the Light and I was swept up into his perspective. It appeared as if the room where his body lay with me at his bedside, existed in a fishbowl. The reality was the Light, the physical existence, an illusion. So peaceful, so blissful, the Light was very familiar to me.

I remembered calling in the White Light to protect my little sisters while I was away at kindergarten and invoking the same White Light to surround my own children whenever I dropped them off for school. If I would forget, my daughter would remind me, “Mommy, do the White Light,” and I would swaddle her and her brother in the protection of the Light that had always comforted me. In that eternal moment, I recalled how the same White Light seemed to bathe my patients and me during a healing and was the one I used to calm injured animals before I treated them.

I had never been afraid of dying, although letting others go was difficult. My fear lay in being alone, separated from those I love by death. As a healer, I had taken a very long time to release my savior complex, to understand that I was not responsible for my patients’ illnesses, nor could I take credit for their cures. I was a midwife to their healing, holding the space in which they recovered or not—it was their choice.

That night after his son came to his bedside to say goodbye, Eddie died.

Two months later, I received my greatest opening and began writing my life’s work. Never a moment of writer’s block, it all just flowed in. The synchronicity of events, from the creative process, to publishing, to going out in the world to market has been amazing. Still, I am learning to ask for help and whenever I feel resistant, I hear Eddie, “Perhaps I am here to help you,” and open to receive another’s assistance.

Witnessing the rehearsal of his death was Eddie’s final gift to me. Death is a passing through the veil of illusion and into the truth. There is nothing to fear.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

13. THE RED CORD

Writing my novel helped me heal the Mother Wound…the original separation from the Divine Mother…as my heroine Mary Magdalen awakened to her truth as the Divine Daughter…so did I…and in doing so received the fullness of the Divine Mother.

I reconnected to Her…embodied in the Earth…enlivened in the hearts of so many women here in Ojai…mothers and grandmothers who receive me…as if I am the Divine Daughter…and I feel it. I see the Divine Daughter energy in so many others…women young and old and even a few precious men.

Nearly three years after LoveDance® was launched, I found myself facing another wound…the Father Wound—separation from the Divine Father. Yes, I had begun Book II… LoveDance® is a trilogy…and I began the second book shortly after the first was launched…I got 1/3 through the writing…and just as my heroine Mary Magdalen confronts her father wound…I could write no more!

Why? Because until I face it, live it, breathe it, am I able to write it. What I wrote in the first book became manifest for me. I did not realize the depth of the mother wound I embodied, imprinted since prenatal time, brought into this lifetime as deep karmic imprints. I had done a regression on myself many years before. Way before LoveDance® …two years before I dreamt I was Mary Magdalen walking down the streets of Nazareth, I brought myself back to the womb…Disentangled myself from maternal karmic imprints… from the Red Cord…

Looking down between my fetal thighs, I was surprised to see NO penis! No blade! How could I accomplish my mission in this form? I felt a pulsation deep in my belly, putrid fearful, coming not from me, but through the umbilical cord—the Red Cord.

It was my mother’s fear. I felt her. Her world as she perceived it…the struggle with her parents, her new husband, her fear…her fear of her mother, then…

I was in my grandmother’s womb feeling her fear through the red cord. And then in her mother’s womb feeling her mother’s fear and her mother’s and back and back in time. Like a video montage, yet I could feel the fear…yellow and acidic as bile…the pain, tears, terror…of losing children, abortions, stillborn babies. Of being raped, used as chattel, traded like beasts. Of husbands, and fathers and lovers beating us, blaming us. Of too many babies, of hunger and pain, of sending our sons off to war and our daughters into the same traps we found ourselves. Of burning at the stake, of drowning, of torture for being our truth. Of giving away our power.

Through my mother’s womb, through hers, and unto the beginning of time. Back to Eve. All of women’s woes…that was my fear. The fear I had been purging forever.
Time to release it.

I awoke with a clear intention and pure desire to release my mothers’ fear, all of my mothers.

In synchronicity that same day, I had an appointment with an energy healer. She was working with another powerful male healer. He stood at my feet, she at my head. I didn’t tell them of my vision, but lay there fully intending to release. And I did. Like a volcanic eruption of black tar, the energy exploded from my belly into the atmosphere. I felt lighter and freer than ever. I opened my eyes laughing and sat up.

The two healers were plastered against the walls of the healing room. “What was THAT?”

“That was fear! And it’s not mine!”

Then I headed to the beach, and lay on the sand, my feet in the water, the sun on my naked skin and was held by the Great Mother. My Divine Mother loves me…I am everything she ever desired in a daughter. I no longer need to purge the fear of my sex.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

12. PARTNERING WITH MY PATIENTS

After nine years of working as an employee first at an urgent care then with an ob-gyn, I had a dream…to start my own holistic health care practice.

So I left a private practice seeing 27 or more patients a day as an employee to slow down and spend quality time with my own patients; time that they gratefully compensated me for and then submitted their completed bill of services to their own insurance. Finally I was independent of the insurance industry. Soon a trend began as patients invested in their care became increasingly more responsible for their health.

My dearest patients supported my entrepreneurial nature by following me into my new integrative medical practice—Full Circle Family Health. One day I was evaluating a woman with postmenopausal bleeding and had an uneasy feeling. A few years earlier my intuition led me to discover a rare growth on her liver. She trusted my feelings and did not hesitate to agree to an ultrasound. That’s when we discovered the tumor.

I had diagnosed patients with cancer before. I had even lost a few to the disease. But this beloved patient was different. Her cancer became our dance floor. I learned to partner with Barbara to the rhythm of her dis-ease, to the changing beat of her desire, to the symphony of her life’s purpose. I held nothing back, dancing with her through choices that I may not have chosen, orchestrating a care plan that fit her needs—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. I researched every option, conventional and alternative. She fought the good fight, but in the end…she showed me how to slow dance.

On the morning of her death, I felt Barbara as a bubble of delight floating through me. Not an hour later, her daughter called to tell me she had just passed. For the first time in 25 years of healing, I experienced the grace of death.

Like most health care professionals, I had viewed death of a patient as a failure and could not fully receive the gift of their passing. But hers, I embraced. I surrendered to loving her as a person, to getting close to her family, to being a part of her circle—truly Full Circle Family Health.

At the funeral, others commended me for coming. How could I not? I came to honor her, to support her family and to let her go. Like many of her loved ones, I shared my thoughts. Mostly I thanked her delightful spirit, free now from pain playing with her little grandson.
This is the way it used to be. Before insurance carriers and malpractice, we used to get involved with our patients. We knew their families, we birthed them, we helped them get through tough times in their lives, and we buried them. We understood the circle of life. They understood too. We respected one another; we were part of a community.

As I dance my dreams into reality, they expand to encompass all I love. Transforming my health care practice into one that supports my relationships, my health and my soul purpose—my LoveDance®—has allowed me to model a healthy balanced life which helps my patients achieve their goals. And those who are ripe for healing arrive from across the globe. They come because I dance their dance.

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon

11. MAY I HAVE THIS DANCE?

Sultry music warms the desert air. And I’ve been dancing—Brazilian Samba—all night. Once, twice with my beloved, but dancing is not his thing. It’s mine. I cannot keep still when the drum calls. I dance with whoever asks. Men, women, children…or just with the drummer.

All my sisters and my mother came with me to this Cinco de Mayo celebration in the rosy desert glow of Palm Springs. Our dear friends invited us to partake of their Mexican feast, margaritas and music. Most of the celebrants are gay…and I am in heaven with no shortage of dance partners. Although my mother ventured onto the dance floor, my sisters kept to themselves, later wondering why they danced so little. At the intermission, the band leader told me why.

He had put on some recorded music and the other dancers left. Still captivated by the energy, I stayed. He asked me to dance. When I slipped into his arms, he made a comment, “Your body is perfect for dancing.”

And I said, “My husband is right over there.”

He laughed. “Forgive me. I have been watching you dance all night. Partnering with dancers of all abilities. And each one you received and danced with beautifully. Your body is perfect for dancing.”

Perhaps he’s right. I have yet to encounter a person I cannot dance with. I just follow their lead. They may be awkward or shy or overly trained in a particular style of dance that may not match the music. It doesn’t matter. Somehow their inner dancer comes out to dance with me.

Years ago, I attended a Science and Consciousness conference in New Mexico. The conference began with Dances of Universal Peace. A large group of us circled around a makeshift band of musicians with drums, flutes and stringed instruments. I was enchanted. The music was so enticing. I danced joyously with each and every one in the circle. And many people approached me afterwards complimenting me on my dancing. “Are you a professional dancer?” I just laughed. Far from it.

I never thought of myself as a dancer. In fact, my husband used to tease that I danced to the beat of a different drummer. But I didn’t care, enjoying the music, the camaraderie, the energy. I called my guru friend. I thought Anika would love the dances, especially since she had been taking ballroom dancing and had started dancing competitively. She huffed at the idea that anyone would think I was a professional dancer. “You’ve had no training!”

Hmm. I didn’t know what to say. But since then I have had many people express enchantment at my dancing. Then I wrote LoveDance® and finally understood.

Dancing is my way of connecting with the energy. A means of celebration, of expressing my feelings, of being present. And life is a dance of love. Steve suggested that LoveDance® is my expression of Self. Love is at the center of the triad of Relationships, Soul Purpose, and Health. I include Health because as a Holistic Nurse Practitioner, Health of Body, Mind, and Soul is paramount in the Process of Enlightenment. It is not enough for me to talk…but to walk my talk…or rather…to dance my truth!

Excerpt from My LoveDance. Available on Amazon